Lexical struggle in court: Aboriginal Australians versus the state1

Abstract

This paper presents a critical sociolinguistic exploration of the cross‐examination of three young teenage Australian Aboriginal boys in a Queensland court. The boys alleged that they had been abducted by six police officers, so they were prosecution witnesses in the case against the police officers. The paper examines the lexical strategies used by defence counsel to construct these victim‐witnesses as criminals with ‘no regard for the community’, and to reinterpret the alleged abduction as a consensual car ride. Of greatest concern is the strategy which I term ‘lexical perversion’– the rejection of a witness's labelling of their own experience, through overt correction with, or covert substitution of, another lexical item. These lexical strategies are central to the judicial legitimation of neocolonial control by the police over the movements of Aboriginal young people.

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